Digital Marketing Strategy

There is tonnes of advice online about digital marketing and what it is you should be doing. Well, they’re all right in a way but it’s important to know what will work best for your business. When leveraged together, using data and analysis can transform your business and form something much larger – a digital strategy. If this is something you are confident doing yourself then jump to our Digital Marketing Strategy Template.

If you’d like to get a Digital Marketing Agency who has been working with these digital channels and helping clients achieve success since 2000 here’s what we can do.

We engaged Matter Solutions to do a Digital Strategy so that we had a plan for the future, immediate and long term, for our online presence. We’d had a mediocre experience with our previous agency and were looking for a company that knew what they were doing. Ben and Sam sat down with us and delved deep into where we came from, where we are, where we’re going, and most importantly we would later find, who we are as a company. They then created a comprehensive Digital Strategy that was in-depth, informative and incredibly detailed that we could take to any other agency to execute. Of course we employed Matter Solutions to implement the strategies because they are the experts, and we are extremely happy!

CARLY LIDDELL
Point to Point Education

• Don’t know where to start?
• Thought about getting an expert but don’t know how to evaluate what you need?

This section will provide you with an answer to those questions and:-

• Help you consider where to spend your money, SEO vs AdWords vs Social Media.
• Whether you should advertise on Facebook, Google AdWords, Bing or not at all?
• Provide a framework which includes a template and worksheets for you to use to record your progress.
• Find which tools you need to make this work for you and your business.

Lets get started!

Understanding the fundamentals makes it easy to implement across multiple digital marketing channels, reach the right people and measure the results.

A Digital Marketing Strategy is all about making informed decisions and ensuring that efforts are focused on the elements that are most effective for your business. To make those informed decisions, it’s important to do some research.

When people talk about marketing, they often think of different social media platforms, websites, and advertising but marketing isn’t about the technology and channels. It’s about humans, and that’s our focus – to understand the human behaviour behind all of that.

STEP 1: Understand your business

But first, let’s make sure that you know your brand voice and understand your business well enough. Do you know your product/service, business goals, ideal customers, competition, strengths, and weaknesses? If you have more than one product or service, you should analyse each of them separately.

Finding out this vital information will allow you to present a clear message for your business, making sure you are reducing your target market and focusing on the most important people.

Describe your brand voice. Is it friendly and chatty? Are you serious and direct?

Find out the elements that describe your brand the best and search for keywords that suit the image you would like to have.

Once I had a customer who said that he wants to be known as someone who is easy to do business with. Basically, his company will do everything their client wants them to do. And now everybody knows his brand voice which is nice, friendly and helpful. If they were a dog they would be a Labrador.

Here is an example from our website:

So try to get yourself a picture of your brand voice and don’t be afraid to use attractive power words that help people to memorise you, it gives you an attitude and makes you stand out.

How my audience feels about my brand?
What is our brand passionate about?
What makes us authentic?
What words describe my brand?
What pictures describe my brand?

Understanding your brand voice makes the next steps easier!

STEP 2: Understand your customers

Now let’s have a look at who your ideal customers are and understand why it’s important to get into our customer’s head and pay attention to psychology. The way people think and act before buying can be rational or emotional.

A decision might take months and include detailed research, looking for different alternatives, talking with family and friends, saving money, waiting for the best offer and then making a purchase. This is what we call rational buying.

At the same time, there are others, who don’t need more than a couple of seconds to make a decision. They see their favourite influencer flying the newest drone and know straight away that they need to have it too. This is emotional buying.

Let’s use selling drones as an example. Who should we target? Here is an example of the different types of customers.

So if we look at the list, we see that each one of them has their problems, but at the same time, we can also define what isn’t a problem for them. According to that, we can already make some assumptions.

STEP 3: Get more detailed about your customer’s behaviour

Now we have just a brief idea of who our customer is. But why do we need more? Because we want to tailor the content as much as possible and build relationships that are valuable. Analysing our customers is like a compass that shows the way towards making a sale. So we need to dig deeper and understand the behaviour of each one of them.

We see the challenges we might have and already think about some solutions. But it’s necessary to understand that potential customer 1 is just a general persona which represents people who might think that particular way. But this is too generic to get our marketing right.

So let’s ask couple of more questions:

We want to know basic information about the gender, marital status and how many children they have but also learn more about their biggest desires, challenges, hobbies.

Let’s say that we know that he is:

• 22 years old
• Easy-going
• Single
• First-year uni student who is studying photography and wants to try a drone.
• Main social media channel is Instagram.
• Doesn’t have a lot of money to spend, probably $300-$400 maximum.
• Has a part-time waitering job, to earn some extra money, but his school fees are covered so he doesn’t need to worry about them.
• Doesn’t care much about quality, as he thinks that it’s just a fun thing to try and he is too lazy to do his research. But if he enjoys flying it, then in the future he might think about spending more money and buying a quality drone so he could specialise in aerial photography.

Remember that having one persona is not enough as you are dealing many different types of human beings.

Now this isn’t just some imaginary persona, but a real person who’s problems we can start solving. We know a bit more about him and can start thinking how to market our drone to similar customers.

STEP 4: Understand your customers journey

Firstly, you need to understand what happens with the customer before they buy from you. Understanding your target group helps you to get them down towards sales. Have a look at the following funnel. Here you can see three different levels of the customer journey – top, middle and bottom.

Top level – Here we are dealing with people who are certainly potential customers, but they don’t know who you are. They might want to buy from you, but they don’t know it yet. At this point in the funnel, we aren’t focused on making sales, that’d be like walking into the first meeting with a pen and a contract.

All we need to do is get the visitors to your website (or social media asset) moving downward (so to speak) into the funnel, becoming more engaged with the story you have to tell. Make sure that the website is driving the right traffic in this way and capturing as many leads as possible because more leads = more chance for conversions.

We can think about potential topics that help us to bring people in and make them aware of our brand. If we move forward with the drone example, it can be something like:

How to fly a drone, a beginners guide.
Which drone should you start with.
Drone videos that make you go Wow!

Middle level – Your most significant responsibility is developing good relationships and keeping potential clients interested and informed. Providing useful information is an excellent way to do this. You still don’t need to go for the jugular and close a deal, but you should include content that is detailed enough for someone to evaluate whether what you’re offering is right for them. Potential topics can be:

What practise you need to fly a drone well (figure 8 and walk the dog)
What to look for in your first drone (two budgets)

It may include sending them emails with best offers, creating blog posts or retargeting your most engaging content.

Bottom level – Here we have to make clear that we are going to get conversions. To catch our potential customers and get them into our funnel we need to use clear call to actions.

Compare DJI and Parrot
Which DJI Drone should you buy?
Should I buy the “pro” or “fly more” drone? Long life drones

Now you’ve assessed each level of the funnel you can come up with something like this for your personas:

So we have Dylan here, who knows that he wants to buy a drone, but doesn’t know where to buy it. We also know that his price range is $300-$400 and if he finds one, he would most likely be ready to buy it as soon as possible. So we need to think what would be the best method, style, words and images that would help him make the decision.

We know that he spends a lot of time on Instagram. So that might be the best channel to reach him. We might create a campaign and target all the photography students, who have an interest in drones. The video-ad that might catch his eye can have the following message:

“Take your photography skills to the next level! Affordable drones for students”

Now we have caught his eye and he is on our website. What should we do next? Hope that he makes a purchase is clearly not enough.

We have to make sure that the content he sees brings him closer to the sale. We can compare different drones to help him find out the best option for him. We also know that he is a visual person, so we should make sure that content is attractive and easy to watch/read. We can make him subscribe by offering him a discount and retarget relevant videos to keep us in his mind.

STEP 5: Pay attention to people outside the funnel

We can’t underestimate the value of people who are outside the funnel as they can build the bridge towards your target group.

Let me give you an example in a totally different industry. Let’s say that you are selling fire suppression systems. You write a case study or blog post about money-saving options, and you include the fact that a fire suppression system decreases the cost of your insurance.

How do you find the influencers who can direct people who won’t naturally reach your funnel? You start thinking about who might already have the audience you want to reach. For example, in this case, we can use insurance brokers as an influencer.

People who work for insurance companies are desperate for this kind of content. So you can share this post on social media, put it on Linkedin or send it directly to insurance providers and ask them to share it. Doing this could attract the audience they have already captured. This is the way you can reach your target customers with the help of people outside your funnel.

STEP 6: Don’t forget customers after purchase

Can we forget the client after the sale is made? Definitely not, as we want to keep good relationships and make sure that we are the number one brand that they will come to if they have any questions or if they want to upgrade. Keeping this positive relationship with past customers will also lead to future referral sales from word of mouth.

So what should we do with Dylan after he has made the purchase? Firstly, we can ask him for feedback. Was he happy after receiving his drone? Is there anything we can do better? Asking for feedback shows that we care about our customers and we want to do our best to offer them a good customer experience.

Asking for feedback isn’t just about strengthening the relationship with your customer. Getting feedback is valuable information that you should take seriously and use to improve your product, service or marketing.

We can also invite him to be a part of our community by sharing his videos and adding our brand hashtag. This helps us to bring our audience closer and build our portfolio with the help of our customers.

Drone shots are usually made for sharing, so it doesn’t take them much effort to include your hashtag in their post. But the challenge is to make sure that they are aware of that. You can motivate them with discounts on future purchases or sharing their video to your audience and giving them additional exposure.

If you are a service based business you can create an exclusive Facebook group that is only for your customers. There you can share updates, encourage discussion and therefore build your credibility. And if your clients have a question, they will always know that you are there for them.

Owned, earned, shared and paid assets

So now we know how to talk with our customers, and we have an idea what channels we should use to reach them. Let’s have a further look at the options you have. Owned, earned, shared and paid channels are all important. Each of them has an individual role, but we want to make sure that we are not putting all of our eggs in one basket. Let’s have a look at each of them closer.

Now we know why understanding customer’s behaviour is so important and the difference between owned, earned, shared and paid assets. So let’s have a look how we can move forward and use this knowledge to bring our visitors towards a sale.

When I first started in this industry, I was a web designer but to be honest with you – those websites were really ugly. However, they made people a lot of money. Why?

The way I think about websites and marketing is simple, and I want to help you to understand it so you could use digital marketing to grow your business and get better conversions. Your website is the heart of that as you have full control over it.

Have a look at the following diagram.

Here we see two simple things:

1. People who come to the website
2. People who leave your website

So there are two things we can change:

1. Improve conversions
2. Bring more visitors to our site

Why is conversion rate so important?

Your conversion rate is the primary measurement for your website. Driving traffic to the site is not enough if your visitors are not engaging. Typically, the average conversion rate is between 2% to 5% which means that 95% – 98% of website visitors are leaving.

So, if you have a thousand people coming to your website and none of them are converting, you need to analyse your website and improve it.

The highest conversion rate I have ever seen is 33%. Challenge accepted?

How to make sure your website is ready for conversions?

Most people think that the person who knows the answer is your Web Designer. No, don’t go there! If you want to find out the things you need to improve, ask your customers! They know it better than any Web Designer. However, a good Web Designer should be smart enough to go and ask your customers as part of the development process.

By asking customers, I don’t mean that you should go and knock on their door, spy on them in real life or track the numbers on Google Analytics. Sure, Analytics is a good tool to see how many people have been on your website. However, there are way better tools that show you exactly what your visitors are doing on your website. Creepy, huh?

One of my favourite “stalking softwares” is Hotjar that costs around 29 USD per month and lets you watch recorded videos of your visitors interacting with your website. All you need to do is embed code on your website, log in to Hotjar and watch recordings of real visitors on your site. You can then see precisely what actions your visitors have taken, and then implement that knowledge to improve conversions.

However, we don’t run it on client’s websites all the time because it’s based in America and it slows the website down. So there is a risk of what’s called observer effect which means that by watching your visitors you can harm your site.

Is your website answering all of the questions your target audience might have?

If you have created customer personas and understood their behaviour, you need to think: what do they want to know about your business? Is your current content answering their questions? Are your call to actions appealingly clear and attractive? Do they feel like they are more than welcome to send you a message or email if any questions occur?

You are dealing with human beings. Saying ‘Get In Touch’ on your contact page and not mentioning what your policy on getting back to them is, might easily cost you a lead and we don’t want that. Do we?

If your potential customers see you as a specialist in your industry, they usually assume that you are a busy person. So how do they know that you have time to deal with their enquiry and that your query isn’t just another email in their mailbox? Say it! Write it next to your contact form but keep it brief and clear. If you promise to give a call back within a day, they have a clear understanding that they are important to you, and they are most likely ready to hit the “Send” button and step closer to the conversion.

But make sure that all of the information is well-structured as we want it to be easy, clear and readable. Images diagrams and icons are also an excellent way to improve readability.

Elements of a bad website

After you have understood how visitors are really using your website & what questions they want you to answer, there are a couple of technical things you need to pay attention to.

Sliders

You probably have seen shiny websites with big colourful sliders and thought that it’s the right thing to do? Think again. Those sliders are terrible for user experience (UX).

They are rubbish! It’s not a TV. People are not sitting there and watching. They are not!

If you don’t believe me, just use Hotjar, and you will realise quickly that no one is watching them. If that’s not convincing enough there is website called Should I Use a Carousel?

Page Speed

Yes, it all comes down to website speed. If it takes ages to load your website, then no one has the patience to wait for it nowadays and boom! You have burned your potential lead! If your load time goes from one second to three seconds, the bounce rate is a third higher.

If the site takes more than ten seconds to load, 40% of users will abandon the page. A slow loading website will be downgraded by search engines, hated by users, and may not even be found in general search results. Even a few seconds slower loading will hurt your site’s SEO.

Google has a tool called PageSpeed Insights but we recommend another, it is called GTmetrix and uses multiple soruces, including Google's PageSpeed Insights. You can use it (for free) to test your website's speed. It could be your hosting plan or website code that slows your site down or even worse – both of them together.

All of the topics we are covering next are leading people back to the website, so make sure that you are taking everything related to that seriously!

Now we know our customers, have changed our website, and it’s ready to convert. Next, we run through how to make your website even more powerful with the help of the most popular marketing tools and tactics.

Using quality content to convert audience

It’s time to start creating killer content and make your customers fall in love with your business! But wait! Before you start writing we need to know what we are writing and why we are doing it.

Content is everywhere and nowadays it’s not enough to just produce an article and hope that it brings you customers. Quality content is the one that leads us closer to our goals and we have to make sure that it’s aligned with SEO. But first let’s see the beginning of content creation process.

So how do we choose the topics that speak to our customers and make them want you so badly that they don’t doubt for a second? I usually start brainstorming – I was on a flight to Melbourne, and knocked out one hundred different post ideas. Probably 25% of them were rubbish, but that leaves us still 75 good ideas.

But what if you don’t have 100 ideas in your pocket?

Yes, brainstorming is not always bringing award-winning results and sometimes it can be difficult to come up even a list of 15 ideas. But the more, the merrier because it gives you a wider opportunity to move forward with the best ones.

So if you want to get a bit of inspiration, there is a website called Buzzsumo where you can browse the most popular articles of the day, week, month or even last five years. This might give you an idea what the hottest topics are, and you can customise them, so they are relevant to your business. You can also set up Google Alerts, choose the topics and region you are interested in and then receive an update once a day with articles that are related to the keywords you have set up. That’s also one of the easiest ways to keep yourself up to date with all of the newest content in your industry without spending the time to search for it.

Make your content shareable

Now I have a list of potential topics. I look at this list and check whether they’re link-worthy and share-worthy, do they pass this line? You’ve got to have great ideas, and you have to validate the ideas. Maybe even collaborate to make sure that the idea is going to have as wide reach as possible. But really, don’t start writing if you haven’t thought about that!

Remember the example about insurance brokers who can help us reach our potential customers? After brainstorming topics, it’s just as important to think about which group of influencers are likely going to share the story – if there aren’t any then the topic is likely not worth writing about… If you aren’t sure what sort of topics are deemed shareable then simply go to the influencers social media/website and see what type of content they are sharing/posting, this gives you insight into what they are interested in.

Length of the content

There isn’t one clear answer, if you’re wondering how short or long your content should be. That’s okay if you write an excellent article that is only 350 words, but the chances are that you’ll need 500 to 800 words to even get off the ground.

Let me give you an example of how to create a short piece of content and still get it ranking high on Google even if the bounce rate of the post is tremendously high.

There is a tool named Google Search Console. If you have connected your website with Search Console, you can see what keywords you are ranking for. You can use this knowledge, to find out new keyword ideas.

ASIDE: We have an article Beginners Guide to Google Search Console. This can get you up and running with valuable data.

We have used it many times to understand the topics people are interested in. With the help of Google Search Console we chose a topic and wrote a piece of content. It was short, about 300 words, and had a little diagram. After publishing, we got a ridiculous amount of traffic. Why? Because we answered the questions that people wanted to know and included keywords that they were looking for.

But you know what the best part of it is? Though it was a short read and the bounce rate was crazy high, Google awarded us because visitors actually found an answer to their question and finished searching. Powerful content marketing, isn’t it?

So that’s the thing you need to consider while creating content – you want to answer the questions people have so you could be the one and only source where they find the answer. Google sees that and gives you a better ranking. Using the example of Drones from earlier, if you jumped into Google Search Console and found that there was a large amount of people searching for “how to check for motor mount stress cracks” and related topics then it would be worth creating a succinct piece of informative content explaining the issue, how to look for it and how to fix it. You might find that nobody else has provided a solid answer to this online and you can start ranking for these keywords very quickly and easily.

The most important components for your content;

1. Ideas – try to make up as many original ideas as you can
2. Shareability – before taking actions, make sure that people want to share your content
3. Realisation – choose the best type of content for your idea according to the target market and potential channels

Let’s have a further look and see what else Google would like to see.

How fast do you want the leads? SEO vs AdWords

There are two main ideas you have to keep in mind when we are talking about Google.

1. Don’t be evil because if you trick Google, you will get banned.
2. What others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

If you want to be visible on Google, you have two options – use organic methods and improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or use Google Adwords (Adverts for Words) and pay for advertising. I like to compare SEO with an elephant and Adwords with a cheetah.

Have a look at the following diagram. You can see that page number one tends to get way more clicks than other pages.

So how can you get on the first page of Google? Firstly, let’s have a look at how we can use the power of SEO to get the best rankings.

SEO

As already mentioned earlier, the quality of your website is essential if you want to get the best possible Google rankings. I have had experience performing SEO for a client who refused to change their website. It ended up with the rankings rising right up to the top positions and then… he disappeared. So I can’t stress this enough – measure your website and fix it! Otherwise, you kill the opportunity to get results.

As stated previously, SEO is like an elephant as it has a slower start than paid advertising but once it gets going it’s incredibly powerful. Don’t expect to see results within a week or month. Usually, I tell people to wait about 6 to 9 months. However, if it’s implemented correctly, it transforms businesses due to its immense impact. Positioning your website high in the organic results is important as this is the section most people click on.

Let’s go back to the insurance broker example and remember why we wanted to reach them if they weren’t even supposed to be a part of our funnel. We know that we want them to share our story and spread the word to their audience who might be our potential customers. But there is another aspect to our content being shared – backlinks…

BACKLINKS

Google loves to see that you are trustworthy and valuable for people and one way to prove it is to get backlinks. But not all of the backlinks are the same because getting a link from somewhere good, is a hell of a lot more valuable than getting it from a source that is poor.

It’s like handing a 4-year old a big and shiny silver coin then a small gold coin and see which one they pick. Of course, kids will pick the bigger shiny silver coin until a certain age when they start to realise that the little gold one is worth more. It’s the same with links.

There are two types of backlinks – White Hat and Black Hat links.

White Hat link building is when you create a great piece of content and hope that other people are going to link your story on their website. The number one challenge as far as SEO is concerned is trying to encourage clients to understand that the number one audience is the person who is interested in linking to your content. To get backlinks, use the same techniques as discussed earlier when we were talking about creating shareable content.

Black Hat link building is nothing like that because you have to go out and pay somebody to get links. This is not approved method and might get you banned. It’s rare in Australia but rife in Eastern Europe. Using black hat links is like digging yourself a grave, so I do not recommend to get into that.

So we want to dive deeper into some White Hat tactics. You can write guest posts and get featured in other blogs or send your content to people who might be interested in sharing it. But make sure it’s an approved method.

Also, don’t be afraid of people stealing your content as it can actually help you gain more visibility.

We did a blog post for one of our clients, it went to a website called White Hack and it was stolen seven times. However, our client’s website was given credit so it was a pure win for us.

If others are “stealing” your content and you get the credit you should be happy. Moreover, you can encourage people to do that and include the policy on your website that allows people to share your content with a reference to your site.

OPTIMISE YOUR CONTENT

Optimising your content includes customising your titles, meta descriptions, URLs, image headlines and total layout and readability of a page. As the number of mobile users still rising, we can’t forget optimising our page for mobile. The structure of your page and heading tags you are using is incredibly important, you need to step out for Google the exact content priority on your page.

INCLUDE KEYWORDS

To be visible on search engines, you want to make sure that you’re using the keywords that help you to rank better in Google. There are several keyword tools that you can use to understand what range and variations of words people use to find a business like yours. My favourites are: Ahrefs and Keywordtool.io.

Ahrefs is a complete SEO tool that will answer pretty much any question you have, the keyword explorer will show topics of keywords so if you are trying to find what people are searching for this is great. You can also check your organic keywords to find what your website is ranking for and the search volume. The only drawback with Ahrefs is that it is very expensive and likely too much of an investment to find out this information.

Keywordtool.io is a good free alternative, it doesn’t have even nearly the amount of information Ahrefs has, but it is good for finding additional keywords.

Of course, you can use Google Search Console as explained earlier, or you can go to Google and just type in some keywords that are related to your topic. You can see that Google is predicting related terms based on what other people are searching for. Pick up some of the most relevant ones and ask yourself if they appeal to your target group.

AdWords

What if you are not patient enough to wait for a half a year to see the results of SEO? Google AdWords is a faster option than SEO, but it does take time to find your way through it.

Google is processing a huge amount of data and they work out which ads are performing the best. There is another essential thing to remember:

Better Quality = Lower Cost

It’s important to remember that Google isn’t decision-maker, humans are. Google is just mirroring human’s behaviour.

Let’s say that a lawyer who doesn’t know anything about AdWords creates a campaign with a keyword “Lawyer”. If he wants his content to stand out with this keyword, he has to pay $46 per click (also called CPC – Cost per Click) as this keyword is too generic. Google gives him a quality score 4/10. So if we manage to double our quality score, we have to pay half less. Or even if we improve it to 5 out of 10, we can still save almost 9 dollars.

HOW DOES GOOGLE DETERMINE THE GOOD CONTENT AND GIVE QUALITY SCORES?

To increase your quality score, you can use the same tactics as already discussed before.
If I click on the ad but go back to Google within 10 seconds, then Google understands that the content is repellent. If I go to the other website, spend there two minutes, and after that, I go back to Google and start searching something completely different Google sees it as satisfaction and gives this content better ranking and good quality score.

Make sure that you:

1. Improve your website
2. Answer the questions people have
3. Make others talk about you
4. Rank to the relevant and not too generic keywords

It also takes time, but that’s why it’s like a cheetah – you just feed it, and it runs. It’s good to make sure that it’s healthy, trained and it keeps running all the time.

I had a client who was just starting his electrical business. At that time he was like a one-man-band with two goals:

1. Get clients
2. Hire staff

My question to him was: “how fast do you want the leads?” At that point, he was already making good money and was happy to invest in both – SEO and Adwords. So, I understood that he’s not in a hurry. Though, in a couple of months, he planned to hire staff so at that point he needed to step up and make more sales. We started working with his SEO and prepared for the Adwords campaign. Adwords usually takes 6 to 10 weeks, sometimes up to 15 weeks to get to a profitable point because earning Quality Score takes time.

So in his case, we were recommending that he’d go with AdWords on quite a modest budget just to get the ball rolling to buy his way in.

So it’s almost like AdWords is going out foraging for the value and then the SEO is going to build farms to the places that are successful.

Facebook Ads

Another way to make yourself visible is to use Facebook advertising.

To the same electrician, I wouldn’t recommend going out to social media as I don’t think that people are looking for electricians on Facebook or Instagram. But on the other hand, social media might be the option for finding young tradies to work for him.

However, organic reach is decreasing rapidly, so we put a lot of effort into Facebook ads.

To start with FB ads, we need to go back to the funnel and define our target group. Take your personas, and think about the message that would be relevant to each one of them.

Our final goal is to convert those visitors who click on our ads on Facebook. 95% of people leave your website without taking action. Are we happy about that? No. So we need to bring them back.

Facebook conversions don’t make any money on their own, but the audience build-up is huge because loads of people see it and click on it. For that, we use retargeting, you can if you have created a Facebook Ads Manager account. It’s free and easy and to collect data, you don’t have to pay anything.

Retargeting to people who have showed interest

There is a thing called the Facebook Pixel that you can embed on your website to collect data about the people who visit your website.

Why should you bother with retargeting? People who have already visited your website have already shown an interest in your brand. It is far easier to target these users, rather than a user who has never heard of your brand. Targeting repeat visitors or customers means you can increase your conversions. This is also a great strategy if you’ve got a sale, promotion or giveaway occurring, as your customers will want to take advantage of a good deal.

Let’s have a look at how much it costs to retarget on Facebook. Let’s say that the cost of a click to your website is $20. Retargeting costs usually less than $10 per lead.

Similarly to Google Ads, Facebook measures relevance score which is directly related to cost of the ad. You can see the relevance score of an ad if you go to your Facebook Ads manager.

Types of Facebook Ads

Facebook has different types of ads you should consider.

• Carousel Ads – Showcase up to ten images or videos within a single ad, each
  with its own link. This is a very good linear trying to transform somebody’s life and show what problem are you going to solve.
• Image – Drive people to destination websites or apps through high-quality visuals.
• Offer Ads – Offers are discounts you can share with your customers on Facebook.
• Page Likes – Page likes ads can be used to drive users to like your Page.
• Video Ads – Show off product features, and draw people in with sound and motion.
• Lead generation ads – Lead ads on Facebook and Instagram help you collect info
  from people who are interested in your business.
• Canvas – Let people open a full-screen, mobile-optimised experience instantly from your ad.
• Post engagement – Most Page posts on Facebook can be boosted to deliver more likes, comments, shares and photo views.
• Dynamic Ads (formerly Dynamic Product Ads)
• Collection – Encourage shopping by displaying items from your product catalogue customised for each individual.
• Slideshow – Use motion, sound and text to tell your story beautifully on any connection Speed.
• Event responses – Event response ads can be used to promote awareness of your event and drive responses.

You can make offers, you can try and pay for page likes, but I wouldn’t do that as I am not worried about the number of likes too much. It also leads you down a slippery road, for example, if you wanted to target Ads towards people who have liked your page, suddenly you are marketing to fake accounts.

Focus on video

Right now you can get the best value creating video ads as they are the most engaging type of content. Even if the video is a bit cheesy or even rubbish, you’ll get way more engagement than you will with other post types.

There is another tip you could use for getting better engagement. You can run the video and advertise it in India, Pakistan and other similar countries where you know that people are looking for Australian content. You will get loads and loads of views, and then you will switch your targeting back to Australia. You keep your 50 000 views where you have invested probably around $200, and then you pay another couple of hundred dollars for another 1000-2000 views in Australia.

We have had some ups and downs with that. We were doing an awesome awareness campaign for one of our clients and got 18 000 people click on their website, and only 200 people got in touch, so it was a tiny proportion.

WHAT ARE THE EASIEST WAYS TO CREATE VIDEOS?

Converting awareness into interest and then into desire and action is very tough in some markets. You have to find a unique point of view; then there is a possibility that you can see results.

Facebook is offering a live video option that you should also consider using. In fact, it is even more engaging than a regular video. Usually, the longer your Facebook Live is, the higher interactions it brings. Therefore, your live video should be at least 15 minutes long if you want to see some results.

There are a couple of things you should consider before going live. Choose the time of your Facebook Live wisely. If you want to get the best possible engagement. You can create a teaser and let people know the time and aim of your live video a couple of days before.

Live video is the perfect and honest way to build relationships with your customers. Be interactive, and attract your audience to comment and ask questions.

Well-created live video has wide engagement and you can promote your content to get even more noticed then retarget people who have already engaged. It’s always easier and more effective to retarget warm leads who have shown some interest in you.

If you are not sure about the content for your live video, you can go back to the content creation section of this page and implement the same knowledge.

4 Steps to creating organic social media content

You are probably wondering if organic content still works because it’s clear that paid advertising is dominating. But it’s still worth paying attention to organic content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest and I will explain to you why.

Why pay attention to organic content if organic reach has clearly decreased?

Earlier we were discussing how to keep good customer relationships after purchase. I gave you a couple of examples of how to use the power of social media to build your community.

Nowadays, if we are talking about organic social content, we also have to pay attention to community management. Even if all of your audience doesn’t see your organic posts, we still know that a lot of them are active social media users. People are used to commenting on social media if any complaints occur or if they want to share their joy or satisfaction about your product or service. You have to be prepared for that and do your best to create and keep good relationships.

Be aware, that people are talking about you outside of your own social media channels. Again, you can use the help of Google Alerts to set up as many alerts as it’s necessary to track all the information that is said about you.

If you create original content, keep in mind that your content needs to be strong. Creating a bunch of posts that don’t stand out is the waste of time. Similarly to paid advertising, videos are worth your time and effort. You shouldn’t be afraid of live video.

For creating organic content, we use the same tactics as we were talking about previously in the content creation section.

1. Creating original content or finding relevant articles using Google Alerts or Buzzsumo
2. Storing all the findings. I’m a big fan of an app named Pocket. It’s an app that you can use for saving articles so you could read them later. There is another app called If This Then That, which helps you to connect Pocket with Google Spreadsheet so you could store the articles that you would like to use later.
3. Scheduling the posts. For scheduling, we usually use Buffer or Hootsuite.
4. Measuring results and reusing the things that go well. Not everybody is going to see your social media content. Let’s take a Twitter for example. You might Tweet something out, it gets a bit of exposure, but you could tweet it to go out again in two or three day’s time. Same is with Facebook.
5. Responding to all of the customers interactions.

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Power of email marketing: Don’t be 20 years behind

Email marketing is another powerful tool you can use to convert your audience and communicate with your customers. There are lots of email marketing providers but I mainly use MailChimp as it has a great automation section, it enables creating segments so you can send people personalised emails and it’s easy to use.

Don’t have an email list?

What are you waiting for! Start creating one now! Make sure that your sign up forms on your website are visible and that people understand what value they get if they join your mailing list. Is it a 10% discount on their first order and opportunity to receive ongoing offers? Regular industry updates? Blog posts that change their life?

You can also embed your newsletter sign-up form to your Facebook page or let people sign up while making a purchase. You can add a checkbox and let people untick it if they don’t want to receive your newsletters. That gives them still an option to opt-out, but it’s proven that people are more likely to keep it ticked instead of ticking it by themselves.

You can also create a campaign and give people an option to win something if they have subscribed to your list.

Email content

Again, it all goes back to defining your audience. Find out who you’re going for (if you’re still not sure, have another look at your personas), try to segment your email list and find out what they’re interested in.

Use this knowledge, to create content that they want to open. People are more likely to read your emails if they recognise your brand and if you offer them something that adds value to their lives. They are happy to get updates and news that are relevant to them.

So if we want to make sure that the people who are fans of DJI drones will open our email, we need to think what is the information that excites them. Perhaps they are stunning and exclusive drone clips or a sneak-peek of the newest drone?

You can also pay attention to your personal habits, and try to understand what brands and headlines you are used to opening.

Length of content

The thing that drives me nuts with clients is thinking about email marketing like it’s 1995. Writing a huge piece of content that’s just going straight to your subscriber’s inbox and hoping that people are going to read it is not working.

The most effective emails that I see now are tiny, they are virtually like Facebook posts, and you just send them out to tease people so they could click through to your website. And after they have landed on your website we come to the most important part – tracking your audience and finding out what they clicked in the email.

For example, if you are selling digital marketing services and creating an email where you share a blog post about SEO, Website and Adwords, you can track which one brought them to your website.

So, if we see that one of our current website clients is interested in doing SEO, we are retargeting them with SEO ads and or giving him a call to ask if we can help him.

When creating email marketing campaigns, I usually do the following:

• Create an email marketing plan
  • Define the audience
  • Add a clear call to action instructions
  • Create segments and groups to do relevant campaigns to recipients
  • Decide what to write – Events, blogs, new products, industry news
• Design emails and keep mobile users in mind always
  • Write it for the audience
  • Use the brand voice
  • Get it proofed
  • Deliver on time
  • Keep your mobile users always in mind
• Spend time creating and improving subject lines and preheaders
• Test campaigns
• Measure performance

It is an important step to measure results for each activity when looking to improve your marketing.

Measuring the results gives you the confidence to analyse your strategy as you progress and change it if needed. Making the right changes is one of the challenges of marketing! You have to test, test and test to see what works for your business. What works for one business might not work for another so it’s imperative to see how your marketing strategy is affecting your business as a whole.

If you haven’t already it is highly recommend to set up Google Analytics as this is the best way to get insights for your website. Some of the main things you should be looking for:

Traffic

The amount of people visiting your website, this is a very useful metric to track. Although traffic isn’t a good indicator into how your website is providing your business value with new customers, it is good to see how your marketing strategy is taking affect. For example, it could be that you are focusing the wrong people which means your traffic will increase but your sales will not.

Conversion Rate

The most honest number that shows how your business is doing. If you are not making sales then you have to overview your strategy.

1. You can measure it in different steps of the marketing funnel
2. You can measure each of your marketing channels separately to see what works and what doesn’t

Additional insights

There is so much data in Google Analytics and it can often be hard to work out what is important and what isn’t. For each website, it is going to be slightly different so depending on the strategy you have, your website and a few other aspects you’ll have to work out what is important to measure.

As an example, you have created a landing page for a product and are pushing a large AdWords budget to it. If you can see that it has a very high bounce rate then there is a good chance there is something very wrong and you are directing the wrong users or producing the wrong content. On the flip side, if you see a very low bounce rate then you know that those visitors you are directing to the landing page are genuinely interested in the content – awesome!

To measure the effectiveness of your marketing you have to be systematic. Tracking the relevant numbers helps you to ensure that your marketing efforts are serving you well.

I have given you an overview on creating a marketing strategy, customer personas, writing good content, using the power of SEO, Google AdWords, organic social media, Facebook ads and email marketing.

The main takeaway is the understanding that marketing is all about humans, not technology and tailoring the content gives us an opportunity to build relationships and reach our ideal customers. The key is to understand our potential client’s behaviour and then move to all of the relevant channels and make steps according to the information we know about our customers.

You can write an excellent blog post or email, but if it doesn’t speak to your audience, it’s a waste of a time and money. If you are creating an email and no one cares about it, you are better off not doing it at all. So it’s all about the content and understanding your customers.

The key is to create content that is share-worthy and bring your audience closer to you. We want them to engage with your brand and at the end of the day – make a sale.

We can use all different social media channels to stand out, but we should look at them as tools that help us to bring our audience on our website. Don’t underestimate the power of your website as this is the place where we most conversions happen.

It’s not the end of the world if you suck at web design as I did. It takes some understanding of how to bring people to your website and how to convert them but after reading this, you should have the knowledge to do that.

So it all comes back to the digital marketing funnel and understanding your customers. There are thousands of ways to market your business, so I want you to think critically – what is the most efficient and relevant to you? What does your audience really care about?

So it doesn’t matter if you want to do a social media campaign, SEO, Google AdWords or email marketing – when you can think like your ideal customer and use triggers that make them take action, you win.